yokai

It’s more than ten years old, watches as good as the day it was made, and is arguably still the best yokai stuff ever filmed. Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (Sakuya Yokaiden) has its detractors, but I am FIRMLY in the lovers camp and if you’ve never seen this sword-girl vs. monsters mash-up, I highly recommend it.

The story is deliberately simple (RARE for modern Japanese cinema) to make room for more monster action; young Sakuya (Nozomi Ando) is the female heir to a family of demon slayers, armed with a mystical sword that while able to kill any monster it touches also sucks the life energy out of the user every time it is used. After Mt. Fuji explodes, unleashing ten million billion angry demons, she wanders the land looking for trouble with her adopted younger brother, a kappa demon she’s charged herself with ‘rehabilitating.’ The episodic, manga-derived film features several encounters with various creatures of Japanese folklore until the final showdown with a kaiju-sized spider queen.

Sakuya is aided by two ninja with an esoteric arsenal of “bamboo punk” gadgets.

Veteran creature filmmakers Tomo’o Haraguchi and Shinji Higuchi made Sakuya after a successful run of Gamera flicks in the 90’s, and boring as those were, the kaiju stuff looked amazing. Here, they mixed the limited digital of the time with some really nice practical creature suits and miniature models to produce a pretty damn flawless composite. This is a great example of SMART craftsmanship that rests on decades old techniques to hide the limitations of the requisite new technologies, technologies other Japanese filmmakers wear shamelessly on their sleeves with often embarrassing results.

The best thing they did though is create a fast-moving, short-running (under 90 min.) action flick for all ages PACKED with monster fights.

Mature kappa are pretty damn scary here. This is what Sakuya’s adopted bro will become if she lets him succumb to his monster side…Undead samurai are always cool.These spider-faced she-devils spew webs. You know its a family film because they spew out of their MOUTHS and not a blurred-out nether orifice.

The first big monster fight is against an evil puppeteer who makes tiny human dolls from kidnapped girls, BUT WAIT-A-MINUTE! Swerve! He’s not the real threat, his grandma is actually a HUGE GHOST CAT!!!

I absolutely LOVE the fact that they built these big-ass suits! The cat is bigger than one of those old iron Mayor McCheese jungle-gyms we used to play on before McDonald’s had been sued by every family in the U.S. and converted their playlands to disease-ridden ball pits.

But perhaps the most endearing scene in Sakuya is the mid-film cameo by the cast of Daiei’s 60’s Yokai Monsterstrilogy in updated new suits. They shot this is an absolutely amazing dreamy quality, with advanced digital enhancing creature designs based entirely in nostalgia. It’s just great…

The climax sees a wounded Sakuya, a traitorous brother desperate for redemption and the rattan bazooka-weilding ninja battling a tarantula queen who grows to Godzilla size. The combination of models, exploding full-sized sets, kabuki-influenced costuming and digital finishes is absolutely off the hook. In a lot of ways it looks better than anything Takeshi Miike did in the excellent-in-its-own right Great Yokai War five years later with more money and more hard drives.

So yeah, seek this one out. It has all sorts of grey market releases, maybe a legit one somewhere…

In the meantime, for your sins, endure another shot of the creepy yokai blue-head baby thing! AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

Pink Tentacle has a terrific series of images from profound illustrator Ishihara Gōjin, including these pages from a Kaiketsu Lion Maru ‘sonosheet’ book:

Otherwise known as ‘Gekko Hayashi,’ Gojin’s paintings and illustrations range from kids superhero and sci-fi books to horrific yokai to homoeroticism. I have a few books of his, and there sure is a damn strange quality to his art, even the most vanilla of subjects done for the mainstream. Figures are strangely stiff, but somehow bouncy and gung-ho at the same time. His girls are often mannish and his male figures are, well… often not so mannish. His macabre stuff is just astounding.

There’s a Japanese language shrine to Ishihara Gojin here, and an in-depth look at the artist’s Jubei Yagyu manga at Comic Press.

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